Which NAS? External drive stopped

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haggerma

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I has an 250GB external hard drive which i have been storing everything on for about 4 years. Just before holiday it stopped working and was really hot. let it cool down and it worked again.

Therefore now looking for some proper storage with automatic backup.

Has anyone used any of the following?

Linksys by Cisco NAS200 Network Storage System with 2 Bays
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linksys-NAS200-Network-Storage-System/dp/B00109T24U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1252174271&sr=8-1
Currently about £90 but i need to purchsed 2 Hard drives

Buffalo LinkStation Live 500GB MultiMedia Network Attached Storage
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-LinkStation-MultiMedia-Attached-BitTorrent/dp/B001FO2VF2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1252174180&sr=8-2
Currently about £90 but will need USB hard drive to use the backup facility

Any views on both or any other solutions would be great
 
I've got a LaCie Network Space sitting here that I'm going to set up tomorrow, I'll yet you know how I get on.
 
Well as you've learned, any of these drives needs proper cooling. If you buy something stupidly huge, it might have two physical drives inside, which is a big no-no.

So make sure there's a decent fan and just one unit inside.

As for brands, well there's this page from Odie at Retrodata. He's good.
http://www.retrodata.co.uk/good_bad_ugly.php

Now I think it hasn't been updated for a while, but if you email him, I'm sure he'll advise on which brands are currently earning him least money.
 
...Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo. Includes 2 drives - 1tb or 2tb version configured in raid 1 (which will halve the size)

This will give you up to 500gb or 1tb (depending on which one you choose) as your data is copied to both drives at the same time but will mean in the event of 1 drive failing, its replacement can be rebuilt from the remaining drive.

http://www.buffalo-technology.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/ls-wtgl-linkstation-pro-duo/


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Lin...7?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1252186281&sr=1-7


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Lin...9?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1252186281&sr=1-9

I use the 1tb in raid 1 coupled with a windows home server for all my backup needs :)
 
Just learning all about the fun of a NAS box

I found reviews and info on NAS here:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/


& they have performance tables here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190/

they have some articles on choosing a NAS here:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/blogcategory/120/230/

the latest short guide mainly tells you what all the options are, but gives a few clues on the features that matter, but sadly does not give a table of prices and features and ratings, although they have some suggestions at the end.

The NAS I recently bought is really for the new business that we're setting up at home, and data security & backup was a very high priority. Smallnetbuilder has some interesting ideas on raid and backup ( http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30060/230/ ) basically along the lines of you're safer backing up than raiding. The forums at smallnetbuilder pointed me towards the Netgear ReadyNAS range as the best backup feature set and very good reliability. The Netgear ReadyNAS units can do backup from a PC shared drive (pulled FROM the NAS), to a PC shared drive, to another NAS, and unusually they can do it on a short schedule (set in hours, not days), full and incremental are available, archive bit or date stamped. There is also a PC utility included which is a shadow system that copies from the PC to the NAS live, on the fly, and can be set to not overwrite replaced files but keeps all previous versions safe on the NAS (sounds great but but I'm not sure about the shadow software's reliability yet, it may just not like handling locked PC system files, I need to try it on some data only directories)

Unit I've got is a ReadyNAS Duo (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Netgear-RND2000-100-READYNAS-DUO-2-Bay-Desktop-NAS-(Empty-Case)) , bought empty but had an offer for a free 500GB drive(now in a new PC), and I've fitted two 1TB drives at a fraction of the cost of buying a ready built drive. They're installed as raid 1. I'm in the process of setting up the network, new PC etc, and the NAS is being set to automatically backup everything on itself to a dedicated 1TB drive in one of the PCs, and I've got two seperate 1TB USB drives to take manually triggered backups in rotation and keep in the fire safe (yes, its belt, braces and piece of string but the business is embroidery design and the design files produced are rather important)

a few points I have discovered so far.
1 - raid NAS is not safe without a UPS. It does not like sudden power outage, it goes into a sulk and checks and rebuilds the raid array after it is powered back on. Get a UPS with USB comms to do a controlled shutdown if the power goes, small UPS units are cheap (<£80). And also set the NAS for journalling, so that it makes sure the data is written, it can go faster by throwing it at the disk and praying, but then the data is not 100% safe.
2 - wired gigabit LAN is a wonderful idea and helps enormously, but you don't get gigabit throughput, its limited by the drive speeds
3 - bits per second is not the same as Bytes per second, watch the numbers quoted
4 - USE APPROVED HARD DRIVES, all NAS have approved drive lists, stick to them if you intend to keep your data. Hard drives are not all equal, some do wierd things. Places like scan.co.uk and overclockers.co.uk quote the part numbers for the drives when you are buying them, just take a bit of care and stick to the approved list for your NAS.
 
Buffalo stuff is good!
 
The Netgear one mentioned near the start is a good budget choice, though if you have the cash to spend then you should really look at the catalogue for Synology and QNAP. I've recently set up a QNAP TS-219P for my home storage and streaming with two 1 TB drives mirrored. Superb piece of kit with great backup, though I suspect it'll be out of your price bracket (unless it was others mentioning cost limitations).

If you're going to stream HD video then memory and processing power is important, and guess what the units from the big companies (WD, Netgear, Buffalo, etc) are lacking.

Oh and on a very serious note. Do NOT believe anyone who tries to tell you not to have 2 drives. Remember this will be storing your precious photos and if you go single drive and it dies ..... RAID-1 mirroring is really worth it if you can afford it.

And finally (I think) as some one else has already mentioned. If you get an enclosure and add your own disks, then make sure you get ones from their compatibility lists else you could get in to a lot of trouble. I think the Western Digital eco drives seem to be the biggest issue causers at the moment.
 
As per shufty, I have a Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo 1TB, in raid 1 config
 
Could I just add one of the most obvious things. You could keep 100 drives, every one backing up your data, but if they all live in your house then you are defeating the object of backups.

An off-site backup is critically important, and even running a network cable into you shed and leaving a drive is a step up from using the same building.

Some of you might like to consider Mozy. It's an online automated backup that just runs in the background and copies whatever files you want to a remote server. When it sees new files, it backs them up too.

It's free for 2 Gigs of storage, and then you pay a per-Gig amount after that. Copared to a NAS drive it's obviously slow, but you just leave it going and know that you've got things covered in the event of a real disaster.

The initial backups can take a few days, even weeks, but once they are done you can rest easy.
 
...Personally I'm just not comfortable with an online backup service.
 
budfox said:
Could I just add one of the most obvious things. You could keep 100 drives, every one backing up your data, but if they all live in your house then you are defeating the object of backups.

An off-site backup is critically important, and even running a network cable into you shed and leaving a drive is a step up from using the same building.

Some of you might like to consider Mozy. It's an online automated backup that just runs in the background and copies whatever files you want to a remote server. When it sees new files, it backs them up too.

It's free for 2 Gigs of storage, and then you pay a per-Gig amount after that. Copared to a NAS drive it's obviously slow, but you just leave it going and know that you've got things covered in the event of a real disaster.

The initial backups can take a few days, even weeks, but once they are done you can rest easy.
Click to expand...
It depends whether you're protecting from disk failure (increasingly common as disk sizes get larger) or fire/theft. My unit comes with remote backup software so I can back it up to an online service.
 
Wookie said:
a few points I have discovered so far.
1 - raid NAS is not safe without a UPS. It does not like sudden power outage, it goes into a sulk and checks and rebuilds the raid array after it is powered back on. Get a UPS with USB comms to do a controlled shutdown if the power goes, small UPS units are cheap (<£80). And also set the NAS for journalling, so that it makes sure the data is written, it can go faster by throwing it at the disk and praying, but then the data is not 100% safe.

4 - USE APPROVED HARD DRIVES, all NAS have approved drive lists, stick to them if you intend to keep your data. Hard drives are not all equal, some do wierd things. Places like scan.co.uk and overclockers.co.uk quote the part numbers for the drives when you are buying them, just take a bit of care and stick to the approved list for your NAS.
Click to expand...

Couple of thoughts as I agree with most of what you have written and this could my just my interpretation of what you are meaning:
If you buy a UPS, you can disable journalling of the drives meaning improved read/write speeds. Well worth doing.

The approved lists tend to be quite out of date. I am currently using four disks in my readynas NV+ that are still not approved, but functioning reliably. It doesn't mean they are NOT approved, just they haven't been checked extensively. Most modern drives from major manufacturers are suitable.

I personally am very happy with my readynas nv+ and it does much, much more - you can stream media (video or music), backup with redundancy, run servers with PHP and MySql and I can access my drive from anywhere in the world that has internet access. That in itself is a huge bonus.

Graham
 
blue max said:
The approved lists tend to be quite out of date. I am currently using four disks in my readynas NV+ that are still not approved, but functioning reliably. It doesn't mean they are NOT approved, just they haven't been checked extensively. Most modern drives from major manufacturers are suitable.
Click to expand...

I'm going to be pedantic on this point :D , you should have written:
It DOES mean they are NOT approved, BECAUSE they haven't been checked extensively OR THEY HAVE FAILED THE TESTS.
SOME modern drives from major manufacturers are NOT suitable, AND SOME ARE


but its your choice. I found the approved drives easy to obtain, at the same price point as unapproved drives and so it really was not worth taking a risk on it.
 
Wookie said:
I'm going to be pedantic on this point :D , you should have written:
It DOES mean they are NOT approved, BECAUSE they haven't been checked extensively OR THEY HAVE FAILED THE TESTS.
SOME modern drives from major manufacturers are NOT suitable, AND SOME ARE


but its your choice. I found the approved drives easy to obtain, at the same price point as unapproved drives and so it really was not worth taking a risk on it.
Click to expand...

Well, all I can say is mine are not on the approved list and I'm not losing any sleep over it. I dare say an 'approved' disk could just as easily fail. My drives were at a very keen price, so it made sense.

Graham
 
Blue Max: its not whether the unapproved drives "fail" sooner, its whether they run OK in all scenarios. There are some strange things in some drive firmwares that at some point can cause trouble. If you do not use an approved drive and run into trouble then the first answer from the NAS manufacturer's support is to change the drives for approved ones.

A few years ago I got a Linksys NSLU2 which is a low powered Linux based NAS which uses external USB drives. Everything went fine for a while, then it would intermittently stop talking with my drives, . . . so I then learnt of drive compatibility issues the hard way. Best avoided.

Hard drive prices are consistently low if you go to the right places, and approved drives cost the same, more or less by a few £, than unapproved.

Hopefully you'll be fine on unapproved drives, however I would not like to risk it if the data is important.
 
I guess you were unlucky. My nas was second hand, so the manufacturer taking an interest is not relevant in my case. And even a tenner per 1tb drive adds up to £40 (which is a good deal of money for me).

But I do my research first and there are forums where people share info and my drives were compatible according to the folks there, so that was good enough for me. And they are by a major manufacturer and not relying on USB which is probably more likely where the incompatibility arises.

So, of course if you buy a new nas, need the support and like to follow best advice, I couldn't agree more. Oh and you can afford it, but if you bought new you probably can.

Graham





Wookie said:
Blue Max: its not whether the unapproved drives "fail" sooner, its whether they run OK in all scenarios. There are some strange things in some drive firmwares that at some point can cause trouble. If you do not use an approved drive and run into trouble then the first answer from the NAS manufacturer's support is to change the drives for approved ones.

A few years ago I got a Linksys NSLU2 which is a low powered Linux based NAS which uses external USB drives. Everything went fine for a while, then it would intermittently stop talking with my drives, . . . so I then learnt of drive compatibility issues the hard way. Best avoided.

Hard drive prices are consistently low if you go to the right places, and approved drives cost the same, more or less by a few £, than unapproved.

Hopefully you'll be fine on unapproved drives, however I would not like to risk it if the data is important.
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for all the info.

after reading all the comments and looked on loads of sites i think i will get the Buffalo 1TB LinkStation Pro Duo.

I need somthing that;

1) can be shared on the network without another pc being on
2) will provide a backup of all stored data
3) can be backed up again via usb to store else where
4) is under £175

my only questions which i can not find the answer to are;

A) If a drive packs up can i just wack in another 500gb drive (approved) and the data will be mirrored onto the new drive from the exisiting drive?
B) Is there any encyption
C) I assume this can be mapped as a network drive
 
haggerma said:
Thanks for all the info.

after reading all the comments and looked on loads of sites i think i will get the Buffalo 1TB LinkStation Pro Duo.

my only questions which i can not find the answer to are;

A) If a drive packs up can i just wack in another 500gb drive (approved) and the data will be mirrored onto the new drive from the exisiting drive?
B) Is there any encyption
C) I assume this can be mapped as a network drive
Click to expand...
A: Having had a browse around, it looks like the answer is no. If you have a drive failure it has to go back to Buffalo under support. Basically if you want to swap drives it looks like you'll need to go for a separate enclosure and disks. My solution a QNAP TS-219P might be way above your budget, by a colleague at work has just got a Netgear RND2000 from Scan and is happy with it - it's his third NAS and he's learnt a lesson or two along the way. I think their deal for a free 500GB drive is still available so you'd only need to buy 1 other drive (ideally the same size and type). This is post sending in the receipt and box serial number.

B: I doubt it, it will probably be using a Linux format volume manager, so running one from your pc/mac would not be a good idea

C: Yes - though if you're using Windows XP you'll find that if you are connecting to multiple shares on the same PC/NAS you need to use the same login for each of them else you'll get authorisation errors - happened to me by accident. Note this is a Windows XP thing, not sure if you get the same problem with Windows Vista/7 or MAC-OS

Note on the topic of disks not on the compatibility lists. You'll note quite a few posts on both the QNAP and Synology forums about Western Digital Caviar Green drives causing issues - the versions of these on the compatibility lists are under advisories that they hope future WD firmware releases will fix the issues. Also the colleague I mentioned above ignored the advice on his second NAS and had to send his drives back as they refused to work with that particular NAS.
 
blue max said:
I guess you were unlucky. My nas was second hand, so the manufacturer taking an interest is not relevant in my case. And even a tenner per 1tb drive adds up to £40 (which is a good deal of money for me).

But I do my research first and there are forums where people share info and my drives were compatible according to the folks there, so that was good enough for me. And they are by a major manufacturer and not relying on USB which is probably more likely where the incompatibility arises.

So, of course if you buy a new nas, need the support and like to follow best advice, I couldn't agree more. Oh and you can afford it, but if you bought new you probably can.

Graham
Click to expand...


:thumbs:
 
blue max said:
I guess you were unlucky. My nas was second hand, so the manufacturer taking an interest is not relevant in my case. And even a tenner per 1tb drive adds up to £40 (which is a good deal of money for me).
Click to expand...


Hi mate, where did you find drives that cheap?
 
haggerma said:
Hi mate, where did you find drives that cheap?
Click to expand...

I got a brace of 1tb for around £50 each from ebuyer.com I got Hitachi Deskstar but they seem to be out of stock now.

I have used this brand of disks for many years now and never had a failure. I do know Seagate drives have had their share of issues recently, so every manufacturer has it's less successful products.

But obviously do as much research as you can.

Graham
 
My backup setup .. I don't use raid drives, there is a case for them but for me i hate the wasted space ... For the important stuff, i.e pictures, documents etc ..

250gb Mac Laptop hard disk 70gb worth of photos (copy 0) (primary system)
Mac Time Machine backup (500gb Buffalo) (copy 1)
Media Center PC (1tb USB drive) (copy 2) (photos/music/film only)
360 GB USB portable drive (Super Duper bootable Clone of Mac Laptop) (copy 3)
60 GB Usb portable (Photos only)(copy 4) (yes needs upgrade)

I find it hard these days to keep the photos i produce safe, raid or not i find multiple copies on separate drives the way to go and the only way to guarantee piece of mind over lose of data, it only takes 1 error in typing or deleting something to render the data on a raid drive inaccessible and if this is the only copy then you are doomed .. How the hell ill keep these photos for years to come is a mystery without the layers i have in place now ill never know ... Id like my kid to be able to see the past he has had ...

Old timers and their film had it easier id say :D (sorry if that sounded flaimbait)
 
right ok i have decided to do the following;

Get a single 500gb NAS unit with a 500gb USB drive to back up to. If i can afford it i will also install a 500gb drive in my pc so i have 3 copies.

I know this is no use against fire but i better than what i hav

which units do i go for, i notice the single drive units do not have any fans, is this a problem?
 
haggerma said:
right ok i have decided to do the following;

Get a single 500gb NAS unit with a 500gb USB drive to back up to. If i can afford it i will also install a 500gb drive in my pc so i have 3 copies.

I know this is no use against fire but i better than what i hav

which units do i go for, i notice the single drive units do not have any fans, is this a problem?
Click to expand...

That is pretty much the system I have, I've got a LaCie Rugged hard drive, that is always with me and a LaCie Network Space NAS, the Network Space can be set to sync with a USB drive connected to it, making back ups fairly easy. The only problem I've noticed is that the USB port on the front of the Network Space, doesn't power the Rugged drive.
 
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